
The Renaissance, 19th Century and Robert Frank
Eric J. Taubert
The recently renovated Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine — which is open to the public at no charge — has scheduled a diverse array of exhibitions through the winter (and beyond) that can be perused together during a single visit.
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read the line of a poem twice.” — Robert Frank
Everyone knows Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank from his iconic photographic study “The Americans” (1958), which Peter Schjeldahl, art critic at The New Yorker, called “one of the basic American masterpieces of any medium.”
In “The Americans,” Frank found his subject matter in recurrent themes of the American flag; automobiles; race; restaurants and dark, low-gloss glimpses at the inner life and outer fringes of post-war America. Frank’s use of non-standard focus techniques, low lighting, ample grain, and unconventional cropping to observe these topics snowballed into a whirlwind of provocative creativity that captured the imagination of the world and was partly responsible for rewriting some of the contemporary standards for photography.
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